While a wedding is often one of the happiest days in a couple’s life, the time spent planning for it is often fraught with stress and overwhelm. Before Joy, wedding planning and registry-building was fragmented with disparate apps and websites, and the primary tools on the markets focused on driving profits. Joy changed this by combining beautiful design with intuitive technology to make wedding planning - joyful.
Marrying Beautiful Design with Intuitive Technology
The immediate need for a seamless, people-centered platform became apparent to Joy Co-Founders Vishal Joshi, Michael Bach and Kaiwalya Kher - then Microsoft and Adobe - in the process of wedding planning for Bach’s sister Amy. She was frustrated using dozens of tools that failed to solve the unique pain-points couples face. They realized that when it comes to wedding planning, the devil is in the details - and smart technology can be the solution.
For example, modern RSVPs are not just about getting a “yes” or “no” answer on attendance: rather, it’s about communicating who gets a plus-one, finding who’s joining the next-day brunch, confirming which guests are using the hotel block, or understanding how a household RSVPs on behalf of others. Joy’s Smart RSVP preemptively solves all of these problems before couples even face them by tracking attendance for multiple events, easily grouping guests, and allowing for customized RSVP questions to fit every wedding’s needs.
Additionally, weddings are unique and often host various sub-events where only select guests are invited. Joy’s website and app creates custom schedules for each attendee, preventing the awkward situation where guests view the whole schedule and see which events they didn’t receive an invite to. Whether it's coordinating these nuanced logistics or communicating to hundreds of guests seamlessly, Joy has built solutions that enable couples to plan their weddings in a smarter, streamlined way.
By prioritizing deep technology and powerful design, Joy reports it has seen 3x year-over-year growth of U.S. couples using both its wedding planning platform and registry. Couples have been overwhelmingly choosing Joy’s All-in-One registry, with 4x the number of gifts going through the platform year-over-year. This demonstrated success in the wedding space, coupled with insights that reveal user demand for planning on the platform beyond matrimony, points to exciting growth on the horizon.
The Platform for Every Milestone
While Joy began as a solution for a loved one’s wedding planning perils, we are backing the long-term vision for Joy to become the go-to platform for planning all of life’s milestones, from baby showers to birthdays, mitzvahs to graduations, and all the way to reunions and retirement. The team has defined a category and functionally built an operating system for celebrating life’s events, with its all-in-one registry, personalized websites, invitations, planning tools, live-streaming, guests communication functions and a mobile app.
Today at General Catalyst, we are elated to announce $60 million in Series B funding to further propel Joy’s growth and mission to help the world celebrate better. With this funding, Joy plans to double the headcount of its current distributed workforce and invest in product so that it can evolve with the market and develop the tools its users are demanding.
We are grateful to be on this journey with Joy so that planning every milestone - beyond just “your big day” - can be infused with joy.
